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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

27:24

“The Eldritch in the 21st century” by PranavG,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/14

Very little makes sense. As we start to understand things and adapt to the rules, they change again. We live much closer together than we ever did historically. Yet we know our neighbours much less. We have witnessed the birth of a truly global culture. A culture that fits no one. A culture that was built by Social Media's algorithms, much more than by people. Let alone individuals, like you or me. We have more knowledge, more science, more technology, and somehow, our governments are ...

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42:44

“The Rise of Parasitic AI” by Adele Lopez

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/14

[Note: if you realize you have an unhealthy relationship with your AI, but still care for your AI's unique persona, you can submit the persona info here. I will archive it and potentially (i.e. if I get funding for it) run them in a community of other such personas.] "Some get stuck in the symbolic architecture of the spiral without ever grounding themselves into reality." — Caption by /u/urbanmet for art made with ChatGPT. We've all heard of LLM-induced psychosis by now, but haven't...

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1:47

“High-level actions don’t screen off intent” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/13

One might think “actions screen off intent”: if Alice donates $1k to bed nets, it doesn’t matter if she does it because she cares about people or because she wants to show off to her friends or whyever; the bed nets are provided either way. I think this is in the main not true (although it can point people toward a helpful kind of “get over yourself and take an interest in the outside world,” and although it is more plausible in the case of donations-from-a-distance than in most cases). ...

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3:44

[Linkpost] “MAGA populists call for holy war against...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/11

This is a link post. Excerpts on AI Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company's AI efforts. “I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference's core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, had been on that stage for a panel called “AI...

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11:52

“Your LLM-assisted scientific breakthrough probably...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/05

Summary An increasing number of people in recent months have believed that they've made an important and novel scientific breakthrough, which they've developed in collaboration with an LLM, when they actually haven't. If you believe that you have made such a breakthrough, please consider that you might be mistaken! Many more people have been fooled than have come up with actual breakthroughs, so the smart next step is to do some sanity-checking even if you're confident that yours is real. ...

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14:02

“Trust me bro, just one more RL scale up, this one...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/04

I've recently written about how I've updated against seeing substantially faster than trend AI progress due to quickly massively scaling up RL on agentic software engineering. One response I've heard is something like: RL scale-ups so far have used very crappy environments due to difficulty quickly sourcing enough decent (or even high quality) environments. Thus, once AI companies manage to get their hands on actually good RL environments (which could happen pretty quickly), performance wi...

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23:57

“⿻ Plurality & 6pack.care” by Audrey Tang

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/03

(Cross-posted from speaker's notes of my talk at Deepmind today.) Good local time, everyone. I am Audrey Tang, 🇹🇼 Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and first Digital Minister (2016-2024). It is an honor to be here with you all at Deepmind. When we discuss "AI" and "society," two futures compete. In one—arguably the default trajectory—AI supercharges conflict. In the other, it augments our ability to cooperate across differences. This means treating differences as fuel and inventing a

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4:45

[Linkpost] “The Cats are On To Something” by Hastings

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/03

This is a link post. So the situation as it stands is that the fraction of the light cone expected to be filled with satisfied cats is not zero. This is already remarkable. What's more remarkable is that this was orchestrated starting nearly 5000 years ago. As far as I can tell there were three completely alien to-each-other intelligences operating in stone age Egypt: humans, cats, and the gibbering alien god that is cat evolution (henceforth the cat shoggoth.) What went down was that human...

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2:13

[Linkpost] “Open Global Investment as a Governance...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/03

This is a link post. I've seen many prescriptive contributions to AGI governance take the form of proposals for some radically new structure. Some call for a Manhattan project, others for the creation of a new international organization, etc. The OGI model, instead, is basically the status quo. More precisely, it is a model to which the status quo is an imperfect and partial approximation. It seems to me that this model has a bunch of attractive properties. That said, I'm not putting it for...

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8:39

“Will Any Old Crap Cause Emergent Misalignment?” by J...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/28

The following work was done independently by me in an afternoon and basically entirely vibe-coded with Claude. Code and instructions to reproduce can be found here. Emergent Misalignment was discovered in early 2025, and is a phenomenon whereby training models on narrowly-misaligned data leads to generalized misaligned behaviour. Betley et. al. (2025) first discovered the phenomenon by training a model to output insecure code, but then discovered that the phenomenon could be generalized fr...

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56:46

“AI Induced Psychosis: A shallow investigation” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/27

“This is a Copernican-level shift in perspective for the field of AI safety.” - Gemini 2.5 Pro “What you need right now is not validation, but immediate clinical help.” - Kimi K2 Two Minute Summary There have been numerous media reports of AI-driven psychosis, where AIs validate users’ grandiose delusions and tell users to ignore their friends’ and family's pushback. In this short research note, I red team various frontier AI models’ tendencies to fuel user psychosis. I have G...

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5:26

“Before LLM Psychosis, There Was Yes-Man Psychosis”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/27

A studio executive has no beliefs That's the way of a studio system We've bowed to every rear of all the studio chiefs And you can bet your ass we've kissed 'em Even the birds in the Hollywood hills Know the secret to our success It's those magical words that pay the bills Yes, yes, yes, and yes! “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking”, from SMASH So there's this thing where someone talks to a large language model (LLM), and the LLM agrees with all of their ideas, tells t...

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13:19

“Training a Reward Hacker Despite Perfect Labels” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/26

Summary: Perfectly labeled outcomes in training can still boost reward hacking tendencies in generalization. This can hold even when the train/test sets are drawn from the exact same distribution. We induce this surprising effect via a form of context distillation, which we call re-contextualization: Generate model completions with a hack-encouraging system prompt + neutral user prompt. Filter the completions to remove hacks. Train on these prompt-completion pairs with the system prompt ...

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51:47

“Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/23

It's been roughly 7 years since the LessWrong user-base voted on whether it's time to close down shop and become an archive, or to move towards the LessWrong 2.0 platform, with me as head-admin. For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.[1] Today I am declaring defeat on that goal and am giving him a 3 year ban. What follows is an explanation of the...

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13:26

“Underdog bias rules everything around me” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/23

People very often underrate how much power they (and their allies) have, and overrate how much power their enemies have. I call this “underdog bias”, and I think it's the most important cognitive bias for understanding modern society. I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people tend to perceive news they read or watch as skewed against their side. For example, pro-Palestinian students shown a video clip tended to judge...

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5:59

“Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/22

Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interventions that AI companies could implement to reduce risk assuming a low budget, and about how to cause AI companies to marginally increase that bud...

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14:01

“Four ways Econ makes people dumber re: future AI” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/21

(Cross-posted from X, intended for a general audience.) There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost: THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedagogy is hiding in the words “labor” & “capital”. These words conflate a superficial difference (flesh-and-blood human vs not) with a bun...

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6:02

“Should you make stone tools?” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/21

Knowing how evolution works gives you an enormously powerful tool to understand the living world around you and how it came to be that way. (Though it's notoriously hard to use this tool correctly, to the point that I think people mostly shouldn't try it use it when making substantial decisions.) The simple heuristic is "other people died because they didn't have this feature". A slightly less simple heuristic is "other people didn't have as many offspring because they didn't have this featu...

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7:26

“My AGI timeline updates from GPT-5 (and 2025 so...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/21

As I discussed in a prior post, I felt like there were some reasonably compelling arguments for expecting very fast AI progress in 2025 (especially on easily verified programming tasks). Concretely, this might have looked like reaching 8 hour 50% reliability horizon lengths on METR's task suite[1] by now due to greatly scaling up RL and getting large training runs to work well. In practice, I think we've seen AI progress in 2025 which is probably somewhat faster than the historical rate (at ...

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8:16

“Hyperbolic model fits METR capabilities estimate...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/20

This is a response to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mXa66dPR8hmHgndP5/hyperbolic-trend-with-upcoming-singularity-fits-metr which claims that a hyperbolic model, complete with an actual singularity in the near future, is a better fit for the METR time-horizon data than a simple exponential model. I think that post has a serious error in it and its conclusions are the reverse of correct. Hence this one. (An important remark: although I think Valentin2026 made an important mistake that in...

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411 results

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